 After much politicking at the United Nations Security Council, no consensus was reached on two resolutions on Syria. How will this impact the humanitarian situation in the war-torn country and put millions of lives at further risk? A year on from the resignation of Gautabai Rajpaksha as President of Sri Lanka, we asked Prashant what's going on on the political and economic front in the island nation, what has changed and how? And 30 years after the People Power Revolution in the Philippines, has the country moved on from the long hangover of the Ferdinand-Marcos dictatorship. First up, failure to come to an agreement on either of two competing resolutions at the UN Security Council on Tuesday has put at serious risk life-saving humanitarian assistance to millions of Syrians living through the war. The cross-border aid arrangement was operational since 2014 under the ages of the United Nations, but permission for the border crossing at Ba Balhawa ran out on Monday, leaving the entire mechanism, which brings food, medicine and other essentials to Syria, particularly a certain part of Syria in Syria's Japanese. Abdul is with us in the studio and covers the region for People's Dispatch. Abdul, tell us where exactly this aid was going, how many people are impacted by it, and then we'll get to, of course, the politics behind why these resolutions, this sort of agreement hasn't been extended. Well, basically, northern Syria, which is, you can say, the last hub of the anti-Basar al-Assad forces, particularly Idlib and the areas around it, which basically also has become much, the actual population was not that much, but because of the war for a decade, a large number of people have moved into that region. And so, around 2.6 million people at this moment are dependent on it. The actual population is larger, but at least as per the UN data, around 2.6 million Syrians living in this region are dependent on the aid provided by the UN. Most of these people, as I said before, those who are dependent on aid, basically are refugees from different other parts of Syria, but the need of aid has increased recently, primarily after the earthquake in February, which basically led to the destruction of the houses, whatever houses they were, and a large number of people have been forced to live in tents. So everything from the tent to the food and other things are provided by the United Nations and other aid agencies. So yeah, that is, this is the primary subject, which basically is impacted because of the non-extension of the cross-border aid mechanism. Right. So what happened at the Security Council? There were two competing resolutions, like we were saying. One put up by Russia and the other by the Western powers. What were the sticking points and how come no consensus was reached, no middle ground was also found? See, in order to understand the basic sticking point, one should understand the history of the war in Syria. When the war began, the US, other regional forces, including Turkey, were supporting the anti-Basar Al-Sad opposition, armed opposition. And since most of the territories of Syria is now under the control of Basar Al-Sad government, and this particular region only is under the control of the forces which were primarily supported by the, what we call, in general, West and Western, West's regional allies at the time, then it becomes much more, the politics behind it becomes very clear. Syrian government is primarily trying to push for reintegration of the region into the larger Syria. And for that, it's basically saying that the continuation of the cross-border aid mechanism, it was necessary, it was, the way it was implemented, few years back, now it is not necessary, given the fact that there is some kind of stability has been achieved. And if you continue to provide aid this way across Turkey, it basically does two things. It basically prolongs the status quo and prevents the Syrian government's effort to end the war in the country, and it also violates the international law, the sovereignty of the Syrian government, Syrian state. So these are the objections which have been raised by Syria time and again. And that was the reason that the aid mechanism was only extended for six months, never for a year. Last time when it was extended in January or February, the conditions where that the whatever Syria's concerns are, there will be an attempt to resolve them. No progress have been made on that and that's why Syria and through its ally, of course, Russia, which is a permanent member, has raised these issues and because there is Russia sitting there, the US and other people, other countries, Western countries, have been not able to push for basically continuation what Syrians are saying. And that seems is the logical conclusion that they basically do not want the resolution of the war, basically want the continuation of the status quo. And that is the basic sticking point. If you just kind of give a brief thing what happened, Russia wanted that the extension for six months, as has been the practice, as has been the practice with strong mechanisms in place to address the Syrian concerns. The countries which vetoed it, United States, France and UK, the resolution put by basically Switzerland and Brazil, backed by France, UK and US, basically talks about nine months extension. Earlier they were pushing for one year, now it is, they thought this is the compromise they are proposing, nine months with no additional mechanism to address the Syrian concern. So Russia was very clear, the Russian ambassador was very clearly stated, if you are pushing for that kind of technical extension, we will not support it until the issues which are serious issues addressed, we will never support the extension of the aid mechanism. Forgive me if I am being reductive here, Abdul, but is it an attempt or can it be viewed as an attempt then given all the context you have given us of the West essentially trying to demonize or continue the process of demonizing Russia, saying they are getting in the way of an agreement that will put lives at risk. Exactly, that is exactly what is happening, if you read the statement made by the US ambassador in the UN Security Council after the vote, it basically clearly stated that this is shameless inhuman act done by Russians, they do not care about the millions of people who are dependent on aid and so on and so forth, but that is not the case. It is the US primarily and the US allies France and UK which have imposed sanctions, Syria is also saying that if you remove the sanctions on us, that is also address the humanity and concern and if you create a mechanism which basically creates possibility of cross exchange of the aid with the rebel held areas and the rest of the Syria, then we are ready to extend it for next 6 months. They are not ready to do it, so the entire attempt is basically, this particular attempt is to portray Russia as and Syria of course, as Abbas al-Assad government in Syria as some as those who are basically inhuman, they are not concerned about humanity, they have been killing their people and so on and so forth as has been the campaign, not understanding the real concerns of the people and the real concern of the Syria at large. And of course, the friends in the media are doing their best to help them build that narrative. Thanks very much for that update Abdul. A year ago, activists and citizens in Sri Lanka celebrated on the streets of the capital, Colombo and across the country as President Gautabhaya Rajapaksha put in his papers and resigned from the office, the powerful Rajapaksha family though is still very much in the political scene and have been rebuilding since those historic events a year ago. As the anniversary approached, Sri Lanka's Attorney General Sanjay Rajaratnam instructed the Inspector General of Police to name 34 suspects in the case regarding the attack on peaceful protesters at Golface. Mahindra Rajapaksha nor his eldest son, Nammal, who have been accused by the protest movement of instigating the mob against them are not on that list. Prashant is in studio now to discuss the political and economic situation one year on from what is known as the June 9 uprising. Prashant, so there is the first question. What is the situation on the ground? Right, Siddhant, if you look at the, if you look at Sri Lanka right now, I think things are in a bit of a flux because on the one hand, the severe economic crisis which marked a lot of last year is slightly abated. And I think there's, you know, there are more things on the supermarkets are no longer empty as per the case upon point of time. They may not be very long queues waiting for fuel supplies may have restored to some extent. But there is also a greater immiseration of the people that has taken place, which is actually a result of this long lasting crisis. So that's, we'll come to the economic situation as well. But politically what we see is that there is a government in place which has really lost a lot of credibility, but which is hanging on because the opposition on the one hand has not been able to come up with a very credible narrative. And on the other hand, this government has through a lot of machinations been able to sustain itself as the only alternative or something or that sort. So, you know, that is really what has helped this government come to power. And we need to remember the context, which is that Gottabai Rajapaksa and Rajapaksa and his family were really in charge of Sri Lanka last year. In fact, at the beginning of 2022, I think six members of the family were in government. Gottabai was the president, his brother Mahindra Rajapaksa was the prime minister. There were other family members in key positions of power. In May 2022 and July 2022, what happens is that the Rajapaksa family swept off from the political chess boat, so to speak. But what really happens is that they did not vanish. And this is very important. And they are able to prop up Ronald Vikramasinga, the current president, who at that point was just a single member. He was the only member of his party who was in parliament at that point. I know of legitimacy in that sense. Yes, and he first became the acting prime minister and then became the president as well. So, Vikramasinga himself has basically his entire legitimacy or source of power is from the Rajapaksa machine, so to speak. So, while the Rajapaksas are not in power per se, they continue to exert a very powerful influence behind the scene. There is no real question about that. And secondly, Vikramasinga has positioned himself as a kind of the only answer to the economic problems of Sri Lanka. He is again championed the IMF loan and the associated policies as the only way to rescue Sri Lanka from this crisis. And because there is, I think, the presence of political alternatives has also not been tested because while there are powerful forces on the ground in opposition, including the JVP for instance, there is no election to really sort of test that, including the, I believe, the local body elections which have not been held. So, that's also a key question and which is why I think progressive sections and the left from the very beginning had kept saying that Vikramasinga was resigned because he has no legitimacy to become the president. And meanwhile, there has also been a lot of persecution of political opponents. We saw that with a lot of student activists who were arrested. And while the protests themselves have sort of abated, you know, you don't see mass protests on the streets anymore, I think nonetheless, there is definitely a very strong underlying crisis that exists in Sri Lanka right now. And the question is that whether sections of the opposition can present and convince people of a credible enough alternative that they pose to sort of address these issues. So, I think that's where we are, you know, say one year down the line, we have a government which is and also is also enacted quite a few authoritarian provisions. So, there's definitely a strong turn to the right as well, and which really raises the question of how, you know, this could be used as a moment for right wing forces to mobilize. From your assessment Prashant, it seems very much like the government machinery is geared towards holding on to power first and then looking at the underlying factors behind the crisis second. And of course, the economy you touched on a little bit is what will keep things on the boil. What do you have on that front? Has Vikram Singh even been able to sort of put out on the face of it some kind of possibility of change? Or is it just fear of the same cycles of debt being just repeating? Oh, absolutely. It's the same because we've talked about this, we've had interviews on this in the past. The Sri Lanka has gone to the IMF innumerable number of times. I mean, I forget the number because many countries Sri Lanka gone all these countries are very similar numbers. So, I think it's the 16th time have not mistaken could be a bit here and there. But, you know, and this time they got there, I think they're getting more 2.95 billion or something and it's really no different. IMF loan comes with conditionalities of austerity. It comes with, you know, conditionalities of privatization and the government has gone all out to implement that. Now it is a fact that maybe inflation is declined. You know, from, I think in September it was around 70%. Now it has definitely come down from that. And like I said, maybe the supermarkets are back, goods are back on the supermarket. But the fact is that people have suffered a vast amount of immiseration and poverty as a result of this long crisis. And that is what often you don't measure except in say reporting that takes place or reports by UN agencies, which chronicle say questions of hunger, how many people are suffering, a large number of the percentage of the population struggling for food, etc. And also this might the return of some of these goods might address some of the middle class constituencies who might no longer be this thing interested in protesting or it might say address say some sections of workers who are, you know, who are relatively well off. But for the poorer workers, for the larger working class in general, this none does not really address the problem. And so there was a really go kind of unaddressed. So the economic issues by no means resolved and they're probably unfortunately likely to get worse because Sri Lanka is going to use, it restores its balance of payments maybe, but the, you know, with austerity policies and with the kind of privatization we're seeing, we're not going to see any sustainable economic policy. And there is no single economic policy that we come as saying has proposed, which actually looks to sort of break out of this cycle that we often talked about on this show, the cycle of debt, austerity and then returning back to the IMF for more debt in some years. So definitely, absolutely no. And, but I think there is also an issue in the sense of a lot of the mainstream political class, including the main opposition are also failing to provide those kind of alternatives and have that dialogue. Leftist sections have presented alternatives, of course, but the mainstream political elite remains bound within the IMF and these global finance bodies and these new and these policies of austerity as the only solution to this crisis. So I think that's a very important issue that the people in Sri Lanka, the organized movements in Sri Lanka need to address as time passes as well. Maybe finally very quickly we can touch on, since we've been talking so much about regional forums on the show in the recent past, any sort of assistance or help coming from, you know, let's say India who's around the corner or other regional bodies? Right. So I think many of the, most of the country's interactions have pretty much been designed around, you know, restructuring loans, for instance, which actually provides condition, sets the ground for some of the IMF assistance to come in. But other than that, I don't see how much of that is really going to help because this is probably more of a, while the crisis is always global, this is really fundamentally a political question for Sri Lanka itself to address it. What model of development does it choose? And from there stems a question of where do you get the necessary assistance? So if you are, for instance, bound or wedded to the IMF model, then the kind of assistance you're going to get is also pretty much based on those terms and conditions. So I think that's also definitely, you know, not really, I mean, while there has been, I think, various countries have cooperated in various degrees to help Sri Lanka deal with some of these issues. India has provided aid, for instance, Sri Lankans have been quite positive about it. They mentioned it time and again, but I think it does not really address the larger question, which is that it's band-aids. Exactly, exactly. All right. Thanks very much for your chance for that update. Another anniversary rounds up our lineup on the show today. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in the Philippines has completed a little over a year in charge of the country. He's, of course, a son of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos. In that time, a recent report has indicated that over 300 people have been killed in an ongoing war on drugs in the country. This is, of course, a legacy of the previous Duterte administration and most of the killings, it seems, are at the hands of police and other state forces. Anish covers the region for People's Dispatch and joins us now via video conference for more. Anish, first up, give us the gist of this report and your reading of it, of course. Well, the report is quite significant in that it is one of the most comprehensive independent documentation of drug war killings. Das has been doing it for a while now, and the numbers actually is also quite revealing. It says about 342 drug-related killings have happened in the first year of Marcos Jr. administration. And this is no different from killings that happened under the Duterte administration, maybe slightly lesser, but it's not that significantly different. What is important to notice is that about 115 of these drug war killings or illegal drug-related killings in the Philippines were conducted by illegal police operations. The numbers would increase to 146 if we count the number of police raids that actually killed people. And then those cases, those raids were later linked to illegal drugs operations. So basically, there is a whole set of impunity for these killings. We have seen like there used to be, this is not just something that we're seeing as a continuation of the legacy. We're also seeing a significant amount of opacity under the Duterte, sorry, the Marcos Jr. administration, because if you look at the government's response to these numbers, they're saying that only five, a total of five were killed in illegal raids. So they are just trying to downplay the numbers. We know it's not five, for sure, because we have reported multiple killings of illegal raids in Philippines, and it's like more than five, obviously. So there is definitely some level of opacity, not some level. It's like a significant level of opacity in the number of killings. At the very least, Duterte administration had numbers, at least of the legal operations that they have conducted and the number of killings public. But in the current regime, we do not see the same level of documentation happening. So it depends on independent groups, independent organizations, human rights groups to actually document them. Most of the time, it's not as comprehensive, because obviously there have been multiple levels of police violence across the country, and not just police violence, but also violence by military operations, which very often coincide with both anti-drug and anti-so-called anti-terrorism operations. In many of these cases, the details are quite hazy. Many times we have also reported how the narrative is also completely changed, completely in contradiction to the existing evidence of these murders. Obviously, the current administration is continuing the previous administration's policy of not allowing international observers, be it the United Nations or the ICC or any kind of international observers, to actually conduct an comprehensive report on the matter. So this is where we are at in the Philippines, where you actually see impunity being significantly blown out. But it's not surprising because obviously the Duterte administration started out by saying that they will continue these operations. There were even statements by ministers of the government that said that they would actually multiply the forces being employed in these operations. Many times it's not necessarily even the police. We have seen multiple operations where non-state actors who act in concert with the police, vigilante groups who have been taken up by the police, conducting some of the raids, some of the murders that we have seen and reported and in all of these, even in those cases, you do not have anybody taking responsibility, anybody being held culpable or any level of attempt to even bring the killers to justice. Because obviously, on paper, you're not supposed to kill even people who have been caught selling drugs. Define the drug law. Exactly. Even under the current drug laws, until and unless they are proved with absolute certainty. The court might sentence them to that sort of punishment. Exactly. And even in that, the fact that there are a large number of people being killed and the level of investigation or the level of responsibility taken by any of the groups is quite significantly lesser than what should have been the case. Anish, again quickly, just to round up. As we've seen in the playbook on these kind of wars on drugs, it's often the most marginalized section of society that ends up paying the price and often like you have pointed out with their lives. We've seen it, of course, in the United States and its action back in the day. It's currently happening in some way in India where in one part, a particular community has been villainized in the same way in the context of a war on drugs. Is it similar in the Philippines? How do we look at the rationale of the government in continuing with this campaign? Well, yeah, it is quite similar because if you look at the predecessor of this nationwide war on drugs, which was what happened, kept happening in Davos under both Rodrigo Duterte and his family members who held the membership of the city. They even had the Davos killing squad, which was basically a group of vigilante people hired by the state, by the local administration to actually hunt. So supposedly, hunt down people who were peddling illegal drugs. It actually ended up killing a large number of people, hundreds in fact, thousands in fact, according to certain estimates. So this was a playbook and most of it was basically taken from the US war on drugs and the kind of impunity that were given. You would see all the narrative being played out. All of that is pretty much the same. There is very little difference on that matter. And very often, apart from the fact that it is obviously affecting the most marginalized people, who even people who are suffering from addiction, who needs treatment rather than being criminalized obviously, you also have civil society being affected by this violence. And very often, there are plenty of cases where independent journalists, radio journalists, rights activists even, who have been advocating against the killings and who have been calling for people to be brought to justice, many of them being targeted by vigilante groups in killing cold murder. Many times, as we saw with the personal rapid killings, we have reported in multiple times how the police administration, the jail, the prison system, and obviously the drug lords are all working in cohorts to actually hunt down activists, journalists to expose these crimes, who actually bring significant attention to it, significant public attention to these matters. And in this, obviously, the effect is something that is felt by pretty much every levels of civil society, even up to the government, where it is a matter of corruption. Obviously, the opacity breeds corruption. It breeds the kind of a nexus between and very ironically between the drug lords and the police administration. And that is pretty much something that is not talked about and will never be talked about under the current dispensation. And this is pretty much the setup that we are looking at even. And it is continuing, obviously it is continuing with the numbers that we are looking at at the point. Alright, thank you very much for that update from the Philippines. And with that, we bring to a close this episode of Daily Debrief. As always, we invite you to head to our website peoplesdispatch.org for more details on Anisha's work, as well as what our other reporters filed from around the world on stories that matter to people like you and I. Also, don't forget to follow us on the social media platform of your choice. We'll be back, of course, with another episode, same time, same place tomorrow. Until then, stay safe. Goodbye.